Review of The Fault in Our Stars

Possible Spoilers:

I heard a lot about this book and originally I refused to read it.  I wanted nothing to do with it because I did not want to read a book that would make me cry and from everything that I had heard about it, I believed that it would do just that.  I can say, now that I have read the book that I did not cry.  I had moments where I might have felt the urge to tear up, but nothing that I read pushed me over the edge.

Yet, given how much I have been told people love this book and all the hype and emotion attributed to it, I find that I do not feel the same way int he least.  I'll admit that there were parts that moved me.  Lines that made me feel something stir inside me either through sheer brilliance or through sentimentality.  But, overall, I was extremely underwhelmed by the whole book.

"Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway.  That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don't you believe in true love?" (pg 61)

When I read that quote for the first time, I had to read it again to my roommate simply because to me it was that brilliant, I felt in that moment that I might be able to fall in love with the book.  I felt like, in that moment, it might be worth it to travel through the pain and the suffering.  And maybe if it had been Isaac telling the story, I might have been able to.  But it was Hazel.  And I have nothing against her.  She had moments of utter brilliance.  Moments when she is so inherently human that I can't help but want to meet her and listen and smile as she talks with Augustus Waters and Isaac and her parents or any other person.  Of course she also has moments where she is a normal teenage girl and I want to strangle her so really it depends on the scene.

And yet as I read on, I found the book lacking.  There was something about it that I still can't quite put my finger on.  Some might blame it on a lack of fantasy or adventure which, I will grant, is what I usually read, but I'd like to think that I have more pride than that.  No, it's more than that.  In this slice of life, these moments of tragic time that are shared, I simply felt something lacking.  I wish I could explain it, but I can't.  And for a moment, towards the end I was going to rate the book far lower than I have.  But during those last three pages, for a moment, John Green gave me something that made me give him a little credit.

"Okay, maybe I'm not such a shitty writer. But I can't pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations." (pg 311)

But as much as those two lines, those sweet moments as well as any others I could find and name for you in the novel gave me hope, I still feel that, in a way, John Green is kind of like my own Van Houten.  Not in that he is some drunk who I can't get a straight answer out of.  Not in the least.  But rather, I feel like there was so much more here and that I missed something.  That there was something missing that should have been there that could have made this book great.  Or perhaps, I simply fail to see what so many others love so much about this book.